The network supporting a telephony terminal often dictates the directory number to use for initiating a call to another party, referred to herein as a terminating party. For example, business environments often enable employees to call one another by simply dialing the four-digit extension, without requiring a local prefix to be dialed. For example, if a terminating party's ten-digit directory number is 613-555-1234, fellow employees may simply dial 1234 to reach the terminating party. Alternatively, an alternate prefix or other number to obtain access to a telephony line may need to be dialed. Thus, the calling party may need to dial a 9 followed by the four-digit extension. In larger business environment, the three-digit prefix (555) may be replaced with a location code, such as 12 or 412, wherein calls that would otherwise be long distance are facilitated by simply dialing the internal prefix and the extension, without dialing 1, the area code, the normal prefix, and extension. If the caller is outside of the business environment, the normal directory number must be dialed. Accordingly, different dialing plans are needed to reach the terminating party, depending on from where the originating party is making the call.
Recent advances in personal communications have led to the development of telephony terminals that are capable of communicating over different types of communication networks and using different types of communication technologies to facilitate such communications. For example, multimode telephony terminals may be able to communicate via traditional cellular methods as well as over wired or wireless local area networks. These local area networks may be within a business environment or outside of a business environment. Thus, the addressing required to initiate a call to a terminating party may require yet another variation of a directory number, a completely different directory number, or a particular uniform resource locator (URL), which resembles an email address. As the number of ways in which a telephony terminal can initiate communications increases, the number of dialing plans or addresses associated with the terminating party will increase.
Although telephony terminals are currently configured to store contact information to assist in initiating calls to terminating parties, these telephony terminals are not capable of determining the appropriate dialing plan or address to use for initiating a call to a terminating party in light of the type of network through which the telephony terminal must communicate. Accordingly, there is a need for a telephony terminal that is capable of communicating over multiple networks to automatically determine an appropriate dialing plan or address to use to initiate a new call to a terminating party based on the network currently supporting the telephony terminal.